Then one night, Shane left the wrong wallet in Kate’s apartment.
“So who’s Simone?” she asked, handing it back.
“Huh?”
“If you’re Simone Schafer of Louisville, Kentucky,” she said, “then who’s Lucy Alvarez of Chicago?”
She thought about how best to steer into the lie. She definitely couldn’t tell her that Simone Schafer was also not her real name and that she’d never even been to Chicago.
“It’s just an ID,” she said. “Everything I’ve told you about me is true. I just need to be careful about who…” Shane struggled for a way to say this. “About who knows me.”
Kate blew a loose curl back from her brow. “You get why this is unsettling, right?”
“It’s not like I killed anyone,” said Shane. “But I have some stuff in my past that I don’t want catching up with me. I’m just trying to live my life now.” She hesitated. “And love who I’m living it with.”
Shane felt the ache of these words, but the woman she’d said them to didn’t seem to hear. “Is that why you didn’t want to come to Sacred Stone?”
“Yes,” she lied, and hoped Kate was picturing her as a bank robber.
“Okay,” she said, nodding, and left it alone.
But things changed after that. Kate started seeing men again and took every opportunity to remind Shane that she found monogamy tedious. Shane swallowed this as best she could. When they were together, Kate was distant in an imperceptible way. They could still talk and laugh. They could still debate for hours. And yet Shane could feel her backing away. Shane walked by a restaurant on a Saturday night, and there she was, clearly on a date. She even recognized the guy: they’d rented a canoe from him a week earlier.
She had no choice; she had to risk it. They went for a hike around the Jenny Lake Loop. The sun beat down, a beautiful cloudless day, and she told Kate everything.
Her face didn’t change much as Shane explained about Kai, Allen, and Quinn, about Kellan Murdock and his skill with explosives. She told her about the people they’d recruited across the Midwest and South. How they were only a few years away from setting their plans in motion. She tried to ground it all, to make it sound as logical and common-sense as possible. They were not kids playing at revolution—they were a genuine clandestine resistance. And they were going to start something real and powerful. She finished, and they kept on walking, one boot in front of the other. Her face remained as placid as Jenny Lake.
“Well?”
Kate didn’t say anything for a moment, and Shane waited.
“No one understands yet,” Kate said carefully. “One day an awful lot of people are going to wake up, look around, and wish they’d done something when they had the chance.”
Shane waited because that wasn’t really an answer.
Kate squinted her murky eyes. “I’m not sure what you want me to do with that information.”
“What do I want you to do? I want you to join us.”
Her smile was sad and disappointed. “You’re a smart woman, Lucy. You and your pals should take a closer look at history.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means that extremism always demagnetizes its own moral compass. The righteous start off wanting to kill the tyrant, but that’s never enough. Then they’ve gotta kill the tyrant’s children and family and army and supporters. How we build this path”—she nodded to Shane’s tattoo—“that matters almost as much as the path.”
“I’m not planning to kill anybody.”
“You know what I mean. And let’s say you—Lucy or Simone or whoever you are—succeed beyond your wildest dreams. Say that you don’t blow yourself up building your first bomb and you don’t get caught and spend your life in prison. You won’t win what you think you’ll win. Civilization isn’t careening into an ecocide because a few people are getting rich—it’s because we are acquiescing to it. We are allowing it. And you can’t change anyone’s consciousness with a bomb. It’s something that has to come from within.”
“Now you sound like a fucking New Age mystic,” said Shane, hating the bitterness in her voice. “Everyone just green your consumption and get in touch with the Earth mother goddess, and we’ll all be fine.”
“Maybe,” she admitted. “Maybe I’m a froufrou Wiccan blessing the soil with my menstrual blood—who knows, man!” She laughed, revealing so much wet tongue, lip, and teeth. “And maybe I’m wrong and you’re right, and one day I’ll say, Holy fuck, I wish I’d done more. I wish I’d driven a truck bomb into the Department of the Interior to stop oil and gas leases or bought a gun and taken out an entire Exxon shareholders’ meeting. But boy, do I really doubt it.”
The argument lasted all seven and a half miles of the hike, and by the time it was over, Shane realized what a mistake she’d made. It turned out this woman was beholden to all the fables of the people protesting in the streets with their pink pussy hats right before they met for brunch and went home to binge Netflix. It turned out Ocean Eyes wasn’t at all who she thought, and Shane walked around for weeks with that special fury you can feel only toward someone who has utterly captured your imagination.
The last time Shane saw her, Kate said she was moving to D.C. to join some performative do-gooder organization futilely humping the electoral boulder up the hill in the hopes that it wasn’t all a grand masquerade. She was taking that poor pretty-boy canoe-renter with her too, and though Shane wanted to despise that kid, she mostly pitied him—he was so clearly unprepared for her, so evidently at her mercy.
Of course, when the first bombs went off, Shane feared Kate would come forward. In the years leading up to the start of their campaign, Shane convinced herself that even if Kate wanted to turn them in, she wouldn’t know where to begin. She had a face in her memory, a couple of fake names, an utterly falsified geography and set of associations. The more bombs that went off, the more they began to succeed, the more she wondered why Kate never said anything. Maybe because she was afraid even the hint of an association with “terrorists” would jeopardize her own cause. Or maybe she was secretly rooting for Shane. Certainly, watching her grow famous from afar, watching the public come for her, the state erupting to stop her, at some juncture she had to admit to herself that Shane had had a point, right? And seeing Kate now, nearly twenty years on, conjuring this loose and uncertain army to stand arm in arm around arbitrarily chosen gas stations, Shane wondered about the roads not taken. Not if Kate had come to fight with them, but if Shane had gone and fought beside her.
Shane and Lali rolled over their shattered country beneath an immaculate darkness bedecked with stars. The radio was full of panic: stock market tanking, home foreclosures spiking, insurance companies demanding federal relief, and in the meantime furious wind had kicked loose soil up into a dust storm the size of New Jersey in the Oklahoma Panhandle. It wasn’t until the Ozarks that they entered the haze. With the first wall of particulate mist, the highway seemed to vanish, and traffic slowed to a brake-light crawl. In the dust’s muffled clutch, noise became indistinct, and the honk of horns sounded like phantoms crying out in the murk. Lali had been quiet for most of the ride, drawing on a sketchpad with her earbuds in. When they hit the dust, Shane felt the uneasiness radiating from her daughter. She’d driven through dust storms before, but this one blew with special dread. Conspiracy theories washed over the radio: Vic Love had hung himself; he’d been murdered by the Joint Chiefs of Staff in a military coup; FEMA was fomenting a communist revolution; The Pastor was going to lead a Christian army to the White House gates, shoot fire from his fingertips, and burn it to the ground. Finally, she turned it off and they listened to Tracy Chapman.